Are you American? Smoke a Cuban cigar abroad, and you can win the exciting opportunity to spend 10 years in a federal prison.

Eh? No wonder we think they’re mental. And no, I’m not proud of the nastyness some Americans say they’ve experienced in the UK recently. Although none of the Americans I’ve met in the last few years, of any ethnic or religious persuasion, have any similar stories: once they mention the fact that they didn’t vote for chimp-boy, all is forgiven [*].

Even if the stories are true (the one from Frontpagemag is unlikely to be, given that Frontpagemag is actually listed in the dictionary under ‘crazy mad right-wing made-up shit’), people need to develop a sense of perspective: being an American over here is not like being a Jew in Nazi Germany, and claiming it is is rather offensive to all concerned. And poking fun at the heartland’s sartorial inelegance does not count as disgraceful racist behaviour.

(Cigar lunacy via Ben Hammersley…)

[*] If they *did* vote for chimp-boy, then they deserve slating, just as one would slate a UKIP voter. This isn’t racism; a British Bush-supporter would rightly be treated in the same way.

Matt Yglesias provides the best summary ever of the US administration’s foreign policy: "As if you moved to a city where there was no police and no laws, but you had a gun while everyone else is armed with sharpened sticks so you figure you’ll be okay and cops and rules and stuff will only hold you back. If you think about that scenario, you can see why someone might think it would be a good idea to be the only guy with a gun in a lawless town, but you can also see that this is a bit shortsighted. Soon enough, for example, you’re going to have to sleep…."

For an example of what proper blogging is all about, follow Josh Marshall‘s campaign against the egregious bastards at Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Mr Marshall is pushing a story that the mainstream TV media won’t cover because they’re genuinely conflicted (Sinclar stations carry all four networks), and he’s mobilising his readership to take real action to stop one of the most disgraceful, anti-democratic things to happen in the developed world since, err, Florida 2000.

Much as I enjoy playing with typography, this seems somewhat more important than some bollocks about fonts. Should you happen to live near a Sinclair station, please do contact their sales manager and then their advertisers – details on Mr Marshall’s site.

Update: NewsMax strongly disagrees about the relative importance of Rathergate and the Sinclair outrage. Which is more or less 100% proof that I’m right.

It seems a bit silly that former Ivy League physics professor David Wolfe needs to take a maths test in order to be allowed to teach in an English school.

However, if he weren’t trying to make a point, Mr Wolfe could easily take the test, submit his portfolio, and teach a lesson with an external moderator assessing to gain a fast-track teaching qualification. This would take up very little of his time.

If we’re going to keep Wackford Squeers-esque loons who shouldn’t be teaching out of the profession, then requiring qualified and intelligent people who move into schoolteaching later in life to take a not-very-hard test doesn’t seem like a terrible sacrifice.

Refusing to smear John Kerry is apparently like denying the Holocaust.

I hope the people who expose and squash disgraceful and untrue left-wing or Muslim Holocaust parallels will be just as quick to pillory Mark Hyman of George Bush favourite Sinclair Broadcast Group for that horrendous piece of rhetoric.

Update: Mr Hyman also says that every suicide bomb that goes off in Iraq is a donation to the Kerry campaign. What a nice man.

Update 2: The Anti Defamation League, not always a body which says sensible things, is right on the ball here.

I dislike Mark Steyn and the reactionary barbarism he generally stands for. Therefore, on principle I applaud the Telegraph for refusing to publish his latest article.

However, the article is actually spot on, which is surprising. Mr Steyn says that the nutcase executioners in Iraq are banking on three weeks of pathetic negotiation and media sentimentality, followed by a video in which the hostage is meekly decapitated. This proves that the west is weak and rubbish, and encourages more of the same.

What you-as-victim should do, says Mr Steyn, is to die bravely like Fabrizio Quattrocchi, thereby messing up their video. Implicitly, what you-as-government and you-as-media should do is pretty much to ignore the terrorists and point out that one man’s life really isn’t very important in the context.

This is also why I approve of Billy Connolly, even if his joke wasn’t very funny.

Kinky Friedman always struck me as a reasonable Texan – one of the two reasonable Texans I’ve ever encountered, in fact. And his songs are good. Unfortunately, he’s now outed himself as a fuckwit, or Bush supporter – the two terms are interchangeable.

His suggestion that "the worldwide mafia of France, Germany, China, Russia" is responsible for the suffering in Darfur is offensive and ridiculous. His claim that everyone is picking on America, rather than vice versa, is completely insane.

Even decent liberals seem to be being suckered into the absurd myth of American victimhood, which is sad. Oh well. I guess it’s back to Billy Connolly (incidentally, all the sanctimonious pricks who criticised his Ken Bigley joke thoroughly deserve decapitation…)

Update: only the sanctimonious pricks who criticised the joke on the grounds that it was offensive to the Bigley family deserve decapitation. People who criticised it on the grounds that it wasn’t funny are excused.

It would have been better not to have invaded Iraq in the first place. But we did, and everyone concerned has to deal with the consequences. If US/UK forces were to leave the country, then even more people would die in the resulting chaos than already have, and the resulting non-state would become a terrorist base of choice.

It’s not particularly surprising, then, that Iraq’s trade unions support the occupation for now. It is a little surprising, even now, that the Stop the War people are denouncing the Iraqi unions as quislings for daring to support Iyad Allawi and Jack Straw rather than the ‘resistance’.

STWC are bizarre. It’s almost as if, having been proven right about the unwisdom of starting the war, they’ve set out on a mission to ensure they emerge with no more credit or credibility than anyone else concerned – right down to the US administration.

For a while, earlier this year, the British immigration system was working rather well. Asylum applications were way down, while more people than ever before were getting in under the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme.

Some of the latter exaggerated their skills to get in (including, notoriously, the one-legged man who claimed to be a roofer). The sensible response would be "oh well – immigrants enrich our society and do the jobs that most native-born Brits are too lazy to bother with; let’s not worry if one or two are faking it".

Unfortunately, far too many British people are demented xenophobes for that attitude to prevail. As a result, visa rules have become so harsh that it now takes over three months to get in – not great if you’re a foreign expert flying in for a conference, for example.

Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

Being a uniformed policemen requires few conventional job skills. You certainly don’t require qualifications or experience; the main thing you need is a limited degree of physical fitness.

Given the meagre entrance requirements, policemen are paid notably more than their talents would earn them in any alternative job open to people with the same level of qualification and experience, such as toilet cleaner or roadsweeper. Presumably the reason for this is that policemen are at a moderately greater risk of personal violence than a toilet cleaner or roadsweeper.

If we were morally coherent, then, we’d view a policeman who was shot as no more heroic than a labourer who died in an industrial accident: both people died doing moderately dangerous jobs, because they were willing to trade increased personal risk for slightly higher pay than the minimum wage. The most notable difference between the two situations is that what builders do is unequivocally useful.

So why do we regard people who assault or kill cops as *worse* than people who assualt and kill members of the public?